Domino Rally

Johnny Domino was a band from the UK that used this page to foist their musical tastes on the general populace and to engage in cliquey musical one-upmanship amongst themselves.
Four years after winding down the page, and for no real good reason, Steve is re-posting all the tracks!

Monday, February 25, 2013

In July of 2009, I got an email purporting to be from Google, with a cease and desist order. This related to an old blog post, featuring some very OLD music.

When I started this MP3 blog (and that term seems very quaint and antiquated now!), I was under no illusions that what we were doing was anything other than... well, illegal. Copyright Infringement. That sort of thing.

But I sold the idea to the other members of Johnny Domino as a way for us to stay in contact with each other and maybe promote the "work" we were doing.

Anyway, I always told myself (and my now-wife), that if I ever got a C&D order I would pull the plug.

So when it came through, I - quite frankly - freaked out and deleted all of the posts.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE:

All the files (images and mp3s) were stored on the Johnny Domino website server, so I should have just disabled hotlinking from the blog. That way, all the writing we worked on (and all the lovely comments we received) would be safe forever.

Durr.

However...

Before I pulled the posts, I created a PDF of the whole site. And I have most of the comments as Blogger automatic-notification emails.

So - for no real reason AT ALL - I've decided to put them all online again, linking wherever possible to the songs we talked about on Spotify. I'll even add a comments digest for posts.

This will take time! And who knows? Eventually we might add some new stuff (somehow!).

But for the moment, I'm just enjoying looking back at a time when (really) pretty much all we cared about was music, before we all got married and (some of us) had kids - hilariously, this is pretty much as wild as our wild young days got.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Friday, July 25, 2008

Bad News was the spoof New Wave of British Heavy Metal band featured in the first series of The Comic Strip Presents... This metal spoof was in production at the same time as This Is Spinal Tap.

Obviously
Tap has had more long-term success but Bad News put a quintessentially
English-toilet-circuit spin onto the pretensions of musicians, heavy
metal or otherwise. Sometimes they overdid the 'we can't play our
instruments' jokes but anyone who has ever been in a band (especially
one that has been in a recording studio) will wince in recognition at
some of the studio dialogue here.

The lines 'drop me in for the
badda-das' and 'I've never had to move my arm up and down so many times
in my life' definitely passed into Johnny Domino lexicon.

Bad News - Excalibur

Bad News - Warriors Of Genghis Khan

Bad News - Hey Mr Bassman

The characters were in the main extensions of the Young Ones
archetypes - Ade Edmondson's Vim Fuego had the same barely-controlled
rage as Vyv (just slightly more coherent), Rik Mayall's Colin Grigson
was self-important, effete and pretentious in the same way as Rick, and
Nigel Planer is just as dopey being Den Dennis as he was as Neil.

It's pretty clear that the Bad News boys had been listening to the infamous, hilarious Trogg Tapes. For more band-based shenanigans see also Father Ted's A Song for Europe - "play the f**king note!"

Friday, June 27, 2008

The world is funny old place and as A Tribe Called Quest said, "things go in cycles".

I have been on at dear brother Ox for absolutely AGES to do a post about The Stupids
- or lend me his vinyl of "Peruvian Vacation" so I could do one. I've
finally got round to doing it. And what do I see in today's Guardian? A review of the same album's swanky new deluxe edition CD...

I have to say, I'm really chuffed that a band like Les Stupides is
getting the reissue treatment. As the review says they were a strange
band - perrenial Peel-faves who often popped up on the pages of Smash
Hits.

And, as the kids would say, they certainly did shred... make no mistake.

The Stupids - Virgin Bombshell Fucker / It's Fun To You

This is the opening one-two punch that opens Peruvian Vacation and for me it will always be the sound of hay fever.

To explain: there is a really cold room in our parents' house where me
and Ox would go to get some respite from streaming noses and sneezing
during the summer holidays. Days were spent playing records and eating
ice lollies, and Peruvian Vacation
was one of our favourite albums to play, representing a level of energy
and enthusiasm that we could never hope to acheive post-sneezing fit.
Good times.

It also makes me think of my old skateboarding school friends, Batesy and Fletch - do people still wear Vision Streetwear?

Sunday, June 22, 2008

With apologies for the extended period of radio silence - I hope this
will make up for it. Just right for the second day of British summer
time - looking out my window at some increasingly mouldy garden
furniture.

But who needs to feel down when there are footstomping party-bangers like this?

Bar-Kays - Knucklehead

Taken
from "Soul Finger" which my dear brother Ox gave me for my recent
birthday. Vinyl is always appreciated, and this track fair took my face
when I first played it.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

I've been thinking about posting some Butthole Surfers stuff for a while but the announcement that the (kind-of *) classic line-up is reforming for some US and European dates seems like the perfect opportunity.(*
By the way, the "kind-of" is because Paul Leary's involvement seems
pretty much minimal. Wonder if Ta-Da the Shit Lady will be coming along
for the ride...)

Anyhoo, the Buttholes album I've listened to the most is piouhgd. Not-
admittedly - the coolest choice but for a long time this was the only
album of theirs that we actually owned (who else misses tapes?).

I recently got hold of the Latino Buggerveil reissue which also includes the WidowermakerEP. We had this track on tape off an old Peel show for years and it was great to hear it again.

Butthole Surfers - The Colored F.B.I. Guy

Funnily
enough, I was convinced it had a somewhat less contentious song title
back then (a series of numbers, something like "1408" - any ideas?).
Whatever, it just goes to show that maybe Gibby really did want to be in
REM after all (from Double Live).

piouhgd
has apparently been disowned by Gibby and Leary but one of the reasons I
really like it is the weird way in which it has been recorded. All of
the drums sound exactly like the default settings on an Alesis HR-16
drum machine - and I do mean EXACTLY, even down to the stereo
positioning and the fact that, unless you change the levels, the hi-hats
and cymbals are way too loud.

Did they have a complicated
technological set-up that enabled King Coffey to play the sounds live?
or most likely, did they programme the whole album onto a drum machine
in this configuration? Whatever, it's quite odd for a band who had
previously had two drummers to drop live drum sounds.

Similarly, it's an odd decision for a band so closely aligned to the 1988 Melody Maker Arsequake
scene that it sounds clearly like the guitars weren't recorded going
into amplifiers but were stuck directly into the mixing console - that's
why the distortion is so very fuzzy and hissy. The whole album is
pretty tinny sounding - whatever, a band called the Butthole Surfers
were never going to be Steely Dan, were they?

Yes, there are some crappy stoner humour tracks (and possibly a few too many versions of Lonesome Bulldog)
but the opening double whammy of both "Revolution"'s is still one of my
favourite Buttholes moments. I've stuck both the tracks together for
your improved listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Butthole Surfers - Revolution Part 1 / Revolution Part 2

If you're wondering, Gary Shandling is "just one of those people who haunt me", according to Gibby.

By way of aural demonstration of the recording style, there's an old Johnny Domino song that we recorded with the exact same sounds. It's part of The Best of the Shithouse Masters download available here.
Lead guitar and distorted bass straight into the 4-track and
more-or-less default settings on the HR-16 that we used on all of our
"proper" recordings. It's the Scorpions/Euro-rock pastiche called Reachin' For a Reason (and that's still the most righteous guitar bit I ever played, even if it was a joke).

piouhgd was released in 1991and - along with albums by The Jackofficers and Leary's History of Dogs - was one of the reasons that Rough Trade filed for bankruptcy in the same year. Quite the legacy!

Buy - pioughd/WidowermakerDownload - pioughd/Widowermaker from iTunesVisit - Butthole SurfersBuy - Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life - the chapter about the Buttholes is worth the price alone

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Being 10 years old at the time, The Young Ones
TV show came about at completely the right time for me and my mates at
school. So when they rose from the dead to record the first Comic Relief charity single, I couldn't have been happier.

This
is the B-side to the single, the kind of fly-on-the-wall-in-the-studio
scrapping that Messrs Mayall, Planer and Edmondson would perfect with Bad News. But that, my friends will have to wait until a later time...